Upvoted, but I think the model is questionable. Start with
better modeled as a political strategy and response to coercion, than as an honest report of intrinsic preferences.
Do you have an operational definition of “intrinsic preferences”? I can’t tell if you’re just pointing out hypocrisy, or asserting that there are “real” and “illusory” preferences, or something else. In my mind, there’s a lot of deception (both self- and other-targeted) involved in understanding and communicating one’s preferences, and a whole lot of speech acts related to the topic are not directly felt. A lot of moralizing falls into this category—say what I want others to do, which isn’t what I “want” to do myself.
In humans, there’s a ton of inconsistency as well, which makes “preferences” a slippery concept.
Sometimes people profess or try to reveal a preference for X, as a response to coercive pressures that are specifically motivated by prior underlying preferences for anti-X. This is what I’m calling preference inversion. My intuition is that generally, upon reflection, people would prefer to satisfy their and others’ preferences as calculated prior to such influences. I don’t know whether there are other sorts of analogous distorting factors nearly all reasonable people would not like to satisfy upon reflection, but in general, I’m using the term “intrinsic preferences” to refer to whatever’s left over after all such generally appealing adjustments.
If you start with the conclusion that sex is great, and anti-premarital sex campaigns are really just anti-you-procreating campaigns and therefore oppressive and bad, then sure. I don’t think that’s a fair assumption across the board (e.g. Amish as an existence proof of “something more”), but it certainly doesn’t work for all preferences and it’s generally not so clear.
Let’s look at preference for eating lots of sweets, for example. Society tries to teach us not to eat too much sweets because it’s unhealthy, and from the perspective of someone who likes eating sweets, this often feels coercive. Your explanation applied here would be that upon reflection, people will decide “Actually, eating a bunch of candy every day is great”—and no doubt, to a degree that is true, at least with the level of reflection that people actually do.
However when I decided to eat as much sweet as I wanted, I ended up deciding that sweets were gross, except in very small amounts or as a part of extended exercise where my body actually needs the sugar. What’s happening here is that society has a bit more wisdom than the candy loving kid, tries clumsily to teach the foolish kid that their ways are wrong and they’ll regret it, and often ends up succeeding more in constraining behavior than integrating the values in a way that the kid can make sense of upon reflection.
So which preferences are “real”? The preference for candy or the preference for no candy and no diabetes? What you are calling “intrinsic preferences” is often just shallow preferences, which haven’t yet been trained to reflect nuances of reality like “more of a good thing isn’t always better” and “here’s where it’s good and here’s where it’s not good”. There’s preferences declared, preferences acted on, and preferences that will be regressed to in absence of guiding pressure. The declared preferences are generally going to align better with the coercive forces than the preferences that will be regressed to in absence of said pressure, but the preferences acted on can easily be more reflectively stable than those regressed to—because all that takes is for the culture to be wiser than the individual, and the individual to not have caught up yet.
Returning to the case of nonmarital sex, of course it feels good—just like candy feels good. There is something there that we need (namely “sex”, and “calories”), but the question is over whether naïve indulgence across all contexts will result in blowing past Goodhart’s warnings into more harm than good, and whether the “oppressive society” is actually forming you into a closer approximation of the reflectively sensible thing to do.
Societies pressures can end up perverted, but individual’s intrinsic preferences start out perverted. Who is closer to reflectively stable, society who aggressively shames overconsumption of sweets, or the kid who wants to eat all the sweets? Society who aggressively shames nonmarital sex, or the teenager who wants to bone everyone?
As we mature, our desires change, and the degree to which reversion in absence of external pressures brings us closer to something truly reflectively stable depends on how much we’ve learned to separate overconsumption of sweets from appropriate consumption of sweets, and overconsumption of nonmarital sex to appropriate consumption. I think the answer depends too much on the specific (sub)culture and the specific individual at a specific time in their life to make any sweeping generalizations.
Actually, I don’t think anti-candy messaging originates as a good-faith attempt to teach dietary wisdom; instead, it exemplifies preference inversion through moralized restriction. Rather than providing actionable information about metabolic effects, it constructs an idea of candy as a moral temptation, creating the very compulsive relationship to sweets it claims to prevent.
Take sugar. The standard message is “sugar is bad, candy will rot your teeth and make you fat.” But instead of preventing candy consumption, this attitude turns candy into forbidden fruit—literally, in the case of those chocolate-covered strawberries advertised as “sinfully delicious.” When dessert companies advertise their products as “decadent” or “sinful,” they’re not trying to warn you away—they’re banking on the fact that labeling some things as bad, or wrong makes them more appealing, by giving them the erotic charge of the forbidden.
(Many successful profit-seeking firms expect such descriptions to cause demand to increase rather than decrease. I’ve written elsewhere about flaws with the assumption that businesses are profit-seeking in the relevant sense, but I don’t think that advertising a dessert as “sinful” is intended as a voluntary equivalent to the Surgeon General’s warning on cigarettes.)
The question of preference inversion through moralization isn’t just theoretical for me, but a live practical problem. I tried to avoid offering my first child sweets for as long as I could, but when my toddler started becoming interested in sweets, mostly they served as appetizers that helped him become hungry for more substantive foods, the exact opposite of what anti-sweets propaganda had predicted. Even if he’s specifically excited about a sweet or other food I’d rather he wouldn’t choose, frequently he won’t finish it. I think this is at least partly because my reproductive partner and I have been careful to try not to force our food neuroses on him, even when this means he’s eating things we don’t think are the best.
There are exceptions, but they prove the rule. Sometimes when he’s stressed, candy becomes more appealing—but that’s less about the candy itself and more about needing quick calories to regulate emotions. Similarly, when he’s seeking comfort or trying to keep himself awake for longer at night, he might fixate on sweets. But notice how in each case, the “problematic” relationship with sugar emerges from external stressors, not from sugar itself. I do withhold sweets (and television) when I have the intuition that he’s asking for them for the wrong reasons, in a confused way, and won’t either get what he wants from them or learn efficiently from the experience.
I don’t think sweet-seeking starts out perverted; growing children need lots of calories. This turns into a maladaptive obsession with sweets when they are made into perverse fetishes by “healthy eating” propaganda. Likewise, children need a lot of loving touch, which should inform their later sexual development. Sex becomes a fetish when it’s a forbidden gateway to that missing love and touch. Cf Jessica Taylor’s All Primates Need Grooming, and Moshe Feldenkrais’s The Potent Self.
In both cases there’s enough work to be done learning contingent self-restraint without the distorting influence of a negative moral valence.
You raise an important distinction I should engage with more directly. Just as there’s a difference between teaching ‘sugar is evil and eating it makes you bad’ versus teaching healthy eating habits, there’s clearly a difference between social pressure that helps people learn from others’ accumulated wisdom (like warning children about drug addiction) versus pressure that creates persistent dysfunction (like sexual shame that continues in marriage).”
Looking at outcomes could help distinguish these:
Does the pressure help people better achieve their other goals, or create persistent internal conflicts?
Do people who successfully internalize the norm show better life outcomes in relevant domains?
Does violating the norm lead to open criticism and constructive learning, or cycles of shame and indulgence?
Is hypocrisy necessary for the system to function, or just an implementation failure?
My post focused on identifying a specific harmful pattern of preference inversion. But you’re right that not all restrictive social pressure fits this pattern. Some pressure genuinely helps people align behavior with their other goals through learning from collective wisdom.
The challenge is that preference-inverting systems often justify themselves by pointing to genuine wisdom they preserve. The question isn’t whether society has useful things to teach us (it clearly does), but how to distinguish wisdom-transmission from control mechanisms that create persistent dysfunction.
Let’s look at preference for eating lots of sweets, for example. Society tries to teach us not to eat too much sweets because it’s unhealthy, and from the perspective of someone who likes eating sweets, this often feels coercive. Your explanation applied here would be that upon reflection, people will decide “Actually, eating a bunch of candy every day is great”—and no doubt, to a degree that is true, at least with the level of reflection that people actually do.
However when I decided to eat as much sweet as I wanted, I ended up deciding that sweets were gross, except in very small amounts or as a part of extended exercise where my body actually needs the sugar. What’s happening here is that society has a bit more wisdom than the candy loving kid, tries clumsily to teach the foolish kid that their ways are wrong and they’ll regret it, and often ends up succeeding more in constraining behavior than integrating the values in a way that the kid can make sense of upon reflection.
The OP addresses cases like this:
One thing that can cause confusion here—by design—is that perverted moralities are stabler if they also enjoin nonperversely good behaviors in most cases. This causes people to attribute the good behavior to the system of threats used to enforce preference inversion, imagining that they would not be naturally inclined to love their neighbor, work diligently for things they want, and rest sometimes. Likewise, perverted moralities also forbid many genuinely bad behaviors, which primes people who must do something harmless but forbidden to accompany it with needlessly harmful forbidden behaviors, because that’s what they’ve been taught to expect of themselves.
I agree that the comment you’re replying to is (narrowly) wrong (if understanding ‘prior’ as ‘temporally prior’), because someone might socially acquire a preference not to overeat sugar before they get the chance to learn they don’t want to overeat sugar. ISTM this is repaired by comparing not to ‘(temporally) prior preference’ but something like ‘reflectively stable preference absent coercive pressure’.
The part of OP you quoted only covers part of what I’m saying. It’s not just that we can be pressured into doing good things, it’s also that we have no idea what our intrinsic desires will become as we learn more about they interact with each other and the world, and there is a lot of legitimate change in intrinsic preferences which are more reflectively stable upon sufficiently good reflection, but which nevertheless revert to the shallower preferences upon typical reflection because reflection is hard and people are bad at it.
“Reflectively stable in absence of coercive pressure” is very difficult to actually measure, so it’s more of a hypothetical construct which is easy to get wrong—especially since “absence of coercive pressure” can’t actually exist, so we have to figure out which kinds of coercive pressure we’re going to include in our hypothetical.
If you start with the conclusion that sex is great, and anti-premarital sex campaigns are really just anti-you-procreating campaigns and therefore oppressive and bad, then sure. I don’t think that’s a fair assumption across the board (e.g. Amish as an existence proof of “something more”), but it certainly doesn’t work for all preferences and it’s generally not so clear.
Religions that regulate sexuality comprise a heterogeneous category. I wouldn’t describe Amish regulation of sex as a case of preference inversion; the Amish try to make sure people consider leaving the community if they don’t on balance like living under its standards. But it seems like some variants of Christianity do in effect adopt a generalized anti-sex posture. Since some of these groups depend for reproductive viability on people failing to comply with the anti-sex posture, this guarantees that the anti-sex groups that survive intergenerationally are populated mainly by people who want to have sex.
I object to the framing of society being all-wise, and instead believe that for most issues it’s possible to get the benefits of both ways given some innovators on that issue. For example, visual communication was either face-to-face or heavily resource-bounded till the computer era—then there were problems of quality and price, but those have been almost fully solved in our days. Consequently, I’d prefer “bunch of candy and no diabetes still” outcome, and there are some lines of research/ideas into how this can be done. As for “nonmarital sex <...> will result in blowing past Goodhart’s warnings into more [personal psychological, I suppose] harm than good”, that seems already solved with the concept of “commitment”? The society might accept someone disregarding another person if that’s done with plausible deniability like “I didn’t know they would even care”, and commitment often makes you promise to care about partner’s feelings, solving* the particular problem in a more granular way than “couples should marry no matter what”. The same thing goes with other issues.
That said, I’ve recently started to think that it’s better to not push other people to less-socially-accepted preferences unless you have a really good case they can revert from exploration well and would be better off (and, thus, better not to push over social networks at all), since the limit point of person’s preferences might shift—wicked leading to more wicked and so on—to the point person wouldn’t endorse outcomes of change on reflection. I’m still considering if just noting that certain behavior is possible is a nudge significant enough to be disadvantaged (downvoted or like).
*I’d stop believing in that if commitment-based cultures had higher rate of partners failing on their promises to care than marriage-based; would be interested in some evidence either way.
I object to the framing of society being all-wise,
Society certainly is not all-wise, and I did not frame it as such. But it is wiser than the person who thinks “Trying heroin seems like a good idea”, and then proceeds to treat heroin as if it’s the most important thing in the universe.
Is it wiser than you, in some limited way in some limited context that you are unaware of? Is it less wise, in other ways? I’d bet on “both” before either.
Consequently, I’d prefer “bunch of candy and no diabetes still” outcome, and there are some lines of research/ideas into how this can be done.
This isn’t the eating your cake and having it too that you think it is.
Yes, computers allow us to do things we couldn’t do before, and that’s great. Before, you might have to choose between meeting with Bob in the north or Richard in the south, and technology enables you to have both. Great!
The thing is, neither meeting Bob nor Richard is a “sin”. It’s not a “thing you will be tempted to do due to shallow preferences” where society recognizes that those preferences are shallow and predictably lead to bad outcomes. Society wasn’t all up in your business decisions telling you who to meet because it didn’t trust you to make the obviously right one; that was on you.
Candy gluttony, like heroin use, is a sin. It’s something that society knows is bad news, but will feel like good news to individuals, because individuals are myopic and lack the bigger picture. If you had lived a million lifetimes, and thrown away your life to heroin thousands of times, heroin wouldn’t be so tempting because you’d know from experience that heroin ain’t great. But you haven’t, so you don’t, and society has some wisdom to offer individuals here.
Candy consumption is the same thing, scaled down a little bit. You’re not after the calories, the micronutrients, or anything real in the candy itself. You’re after how it makes you feel. You’re after the feeling of getting what you want, without thought about whether you want the right thing. In other words, you’re wire-heading.
Pills that reduce the consequences for “sins”—whether candy consumption, or heroin consumption, or nonmarital sex—can be good. If you’re going to die from syphilis because you were too dumb to listen to society, having some forgiveness can certainly be a good thing, and maybe you’ll learn your lesson instead of just dying.
But if you think “Syphilis is treatable!” justifies all nonmarital sex, then you’re gonna need a new type of pill soon.
And if you think that once you have BC then now all nonmarital sex is justified, then you’re on track for a statistically less happy marriage.
It’s not that options aren’t often good, or even that options which reduce consequence of sin aren’t good. I’m also not arguing that antibiotics and birth control don’t open up options for good nonmarital sex, or that no one is with it enough to be able to reliably find them. Some people are; maybe you’re one of them.
But technology is not a good alternative to good decision making and informed values. Waiting around for technology that doesn’t exist yet instead of learning more about what is good now is a mistake. You get better results by learning what is good than by relying on technological crutches, and the way that this happens will often be difficult to foresee.
As an amusing anecdote relating to this, one of the more sexually successful men I know decided that he was no longer going to have sex with anyone but his future wife—whom he had not yet met. I called bullshit, and bet him $100. Not long after he made that bet, I saw his disinterest in non-future-wife sex turn a “I like you and would have sex with you” level of attraction into a “I will do whatever it takes to marry you” level of attraction. It’s hard to even conceptualize such moves from a shallow pleasure seeking mindset, and impossible to enact them. And yet, I’m quite confident that he wouldn’t have been able to marry her otherwise, and that his alternative sex life would have been much worse even from a superficial pleasure seeking perspective. It’s hard to do justice to so briefly, but that was a very strong move that led to a great marriage which wouldn’t have worked otherwise, and no amount of technological crutches would have gotten him to where he is today.
that seems already solved with the concept of “commitment”?
You mean like… marriage? :p
In all seriousness, I’m not taking a “in marriage only!” stance here.
The success story I give above involved sex outside marriage as an active ingredient in more than one way, and could be used to argue against a strict “in marriage only!” stance. At the same time, it demonstrates value of “in marriage only” which has been lost in what the norm has become.
He was able to thread that needle and get unusually good results because he had both respect for and an understanding of traditional “in marriage only”, and a strong enough rebellious streak to not let himself be bound by forces he didn’t agree with. You can’t get those results without respect for traditional wisdom, and neither can you get it by becoming slave to some pastor’s clumsy interpretation of them.
But technology is not a good alternative to good decision making and informed values.
After thinking on this a bit, I’ve somewhat changed my mind.
(Epistemic status: filtered evidence.)
Technology and other progress has two general directions: a) more power for those who are able to wield it; b) increasing forgiveness, distance to failure. For some reason, I thought that b) was a given at least on average. However, now it came to mind that it’s possible for someone to 1) get two dates to accidentally overlap (or before confirming with partners-to-be that poly is OK), 2) lose an arbitrarily large bunch of money on gambling just online, 3) take revenge on a past offender with a firearm (or more destructive ways, as it happens), and I’m not sure the failure margins have widened over time at all.
By the way, if technology effects aren’t really on topic, I’m open to move that discussion to shortform/dialogue.
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(Epistemic status: obtained with introspection.)
Continuing the example with sweets, I estimate my terminal goals to include both “not be ill e.g. with diabetes” and “eat tasty things”. Given tech level and my current lifestyle, there isn’t instrumental goal “eat more sweets” nor “eat less sweets”; I think I’m somewhere near the balance, and I wouldn’t want society to pass any judgement.
Continuing the example with sweets, I estimate my terminal goals to include both “not be ill e.g. with diabetes” and “eat tasty things”.
That sounds basically right to me, which is why I put effort into learning (and teaching) to enjoy the right things. I’m pretty proud of the fact that both my little girls like “liver treats”.
Technology and other progress has two general directions: a) more power for those who are able to wield it; b) increasing forgiveness, distance to failure. For some reason, I thought that b) was a given at least on average.
I think that’s right, but also “more distance to failure” doesn’t help so much if you use your newfangled automobile to cover that distance more quickly. It’s easier to avoid failure, but also easier to fail. A gun makes it easier to defend yourself, and also requires you to grow up until you can make those calls correctly one hundred percent of the time. With great power comes great responsibility, and all that.
I’ll take the car, and the gun, and the society that trusts people with cars and guns and other technologically enabled freedoms. But only because I think we can aspire to such responsibilities, and notice when they’re not met. All the enabling with none of the sobering fear of recklessness isn’t a combination I’m a fan of.
With respect to the “why do you believe this” question on my previous comment about promiscuity being statistically linked with marital dissatisfaction, I’m not very good at keeping citations on hand so I can’t tell you which studies I’ve seen, but here’s what chatgpt found for me when I asked for studies on the correlation.
I don’t actually lean that hard on the empirical regularity though, because such things are complicated and messy (e.g. the example I gave of a man with a relatively high partner count succeeding because he took an anti-promiscuous stance). The main reason I believe that pills don’t remove all the costs of promiscuity is that I can see some of the causal factors at work and have experience actually working with them to help women land happy stable relationships.
Hmm. By “coercion”, you include societal and individual judgements, not just actual direct threats. It’s still hard for me to separate (and even harder for me to privilege) “innate” preferences, over “holistic” preferences which acknowledge that there is a real advantage to existing smoothly in the current society, and include the contradictory sub-desires of thriving in a society, getting along well with allies, having fewer enemies, etc. and for the biological urges for (super)stimuli.
Consider two different contexts in which one might negotiate tradeoffs around work. When discussing work-life balance, you can openly weigh tradeoffs between career and personal time. But when asked ‘Why do you want to work at MegaCorp?’ in an interview, acknowledging you’re trading anything for a paycheck marks you as deviantly uncommitted. The system requires both pretense of pure dedication and practical compromises, while making that pattern itself unspeakable.
My post was about how this dynamic creates internalized preference inversion—where people become unable to even model certain tradeoffs to themselves, not just discuss them. And this isn’t just social pressure—you can actually be killed or imprisoned by cops or psychiatrists for ill-defined deviancy, with much conformity driven by vaguely intuited threats to construe you as the relevant sort of deviant.
Thanks for the discussion. I think I understand what you’re pointing at, but I don’t model it as an inverted preference hierarchy, or even a distinct type of preference. Human preferences are very complicated graphs of long- and short-term intents, both rational, reflective goals and … illegible desires. These desires are intertwined and correlated, and change weights (and even composition) over time—sometimes intentionally, often environmentally.
Calling it an “inversion” implies that one set is more correct or desirable than another, AND that the correct one is subverted. I disagree with both of these things philosophically and generally, though there are specific cases where I agree for myself, and for most in the current environment. My intuitions are specific and contextual for those cases, not generalizable.
When one preference is expressed only because its holders are extracting resources from people or mindparts with the opposite preference, that seems to me to justify assigning the self-sustaining one priority of some kind.
Do you have an operational definition of “intrinsic preferences”?
Let me try. I believe that if copies of a person (as determined by their genotype*) would be raised in different cultures and environments, their revealed preferences would mainly be clustered around a single point, with some shifts determined by what desires society showed them as acceptable/tractable and what as unfashionable. Given proper diversity of surrounding cultures list, I’d say the cluster median indicates person’s intrinsic preferences.
*it also seems intuitively right to discount traits that were [IVF?]optimized for, if any, as an outside influence; though, I have no strong opinion on this.
I’d probably call that something like “genetic values” rather than “intrinsic preferences”.
Twin studies and the like complicate the belief that genetic values are “clustered around a single point”. According to Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, religiosity is mostly genetically determined, but choice of religion is mostly socially determined. If you have a 2d map of religious views, then the genotype-derived values would be more of a river than a point.
Maybe we try to save this and say that someone with a pro-religiosity genotype has a pro-religiosity genetic value. But if they are raised in a Christian culture, they probably end up in favor of Christian religiosity and against Islamic religiosity. Given the option of taking a sci-fi pill that made them more consistently religious but changed their religion to Islam, they would decline. Is their opposition to Islamic religiosity an example of “preference inversion” then?
Upvoted, but I think the model is questionable. Start with
Do you have an operational definition of “intrinsic preferences”? I can’t tell if you’re just pointing out hypocrisy, or asserting that there are “real” and “illusory” preferences, or something else. In my mind, there’s a lot of deception (both self- and other-targeted) involved in understanding and communicating one’s preferences, and a whole lot of speech acts related to the topic are not directly felt. A lot of moralizing falls into this category—say what I want others to do, which isn’t what I “want” to do myself.
In humans, there’s a ton of inconsistency as well, which makes “preferences” a slippery concept.
Sometimes people profess or try to reveal a preference for X, as a response to coercive pressures that are specifically motivated by prior underlying preferences for anti-X. This is what I’m calling preference inversion. My intuition is that generally, upon reflection, people would prefer to satisfy their and others’ preferences as calculated prior to such influences. I don’t know whether there are other sorts of analogous distorting factors nearly all reasonable people would not like to satisfy upon reflection, but in general, I’m using the term “intrinsic preferences” to refer to whatever’s left over after all such generally appealing adjustments.
I don’t think it’s so simple at all.
If you start with the conclusion that sex is great, and anti-premarital sex campaigns are really just anti-you-procreating campaigns and therefore oppressive and bad, then sure. I don’t think that’s a fair assumption across the board (e.g. Amish as an existence proof of “something more”), but it certainly doesn’t work for all preferences and it’s generally not so clear.
Let’s look at preference for eating lots of sweets, for example. Society tries to teach us not to eat too much sweets because it’s unhealthy, and from the perspective of someone who likes eating sweets, this often feels coercive. Your explanation applied here would be that upon reflection, people will decide “Actually, eating a bunch of candy every day is great”—and no doubt, to a degree that is true, at least with the level of reflection that people actually do.
However when I decided to eat as much sweet as I wanted, I ended up deciding that sweets were gross, except in very small amounts or as a part of extended exercise where my body actually needs the sugar. What’s happening here is that society has a bit more wisdom than the candy loving kid, tries clumsily to teach the foolish kid that their ways are wrong and they’ll regret it, and often ends up succeeding more in constraining behavior than integrating the values in a way that the kid can make sense of upon reflection.
So which preferences are “real”? The preference for candy or the preference for no candy and no diabetes? What you are calling “intrinsic preferences” is often just shallow preferences, which haven’t yet been trained to reflect nuances of reality like “more of a good thing isn’t always better” and “here’s where it’s good and here’s where it’s not good”. There’s preferences declared, preferences acted on, and preferences that will be regressed to in absence of guiding pressure. The declared preferences are generally going to align better with the coercive forces than the preferences that will be regressed to in absence of said pressure, but the preferences acted on can easily be more reflectively stable than those regressed to—because all that takes is for the culture to be wiser than the individual, and the individual to not have caught up yet.
Returning to the case of nonmarital sex, of course it feels good—just like candy feels good. There is something there that we need (namely “sex”, and “calories”), but the question is over whether naïve indulgence across all contexts will result in blowing past Goodhart’s warnings into more harm than good, and whether the “oppressive society” is actually forming you into a closer approximation of the reflectively sensible thing to do.
Societies pressures can end up perverted, but individual’s intrinsic preferences start out perverted. Who is closer to reflectively stable, society who aggressively shames overconsumption of sweets, or the kid who wants to eat all the sweets? Society who aggressively shames nonmarital sex, or the teenager who wants to bone everyone?
As we mature, our desires change, and the degree to which reversion in absence of external pressures brings us closer to something truly reflectively stable depends on how much we’ve learned to separate overconsumption of sweets from appropriate consumption of sweets, and overconsumption of nonmarital sex to appropriate consumption. I think the answer depends too much on the specific (sub)culture and the specific individual at a specific time in their life to make any sweeping generalizations.
Actually, I don’t think anti-candy messaging originates as a good-faith attempt to teach dietary wisdom; instead, it exemplifies preference inversion through moralized restriction. Rather than providing actionable information about metabolic effects, it constructs an idea of candy as a moral temptation, creating the very compulsive relationship to sweets it claims to prevent.
Take sugar. The standard message is “sugar is bad, candy will rot your teeth and make you fat.” But instead of preventing candy consumption, this attitude turns candy into forbidden fruit—literally, in the case of those chocolate-covered strawberries advertised as “sinfully delicious.” When dessert companies advertise their products as “decadent” or “sinful,” they’re not trying to warn you away—they’re banking on the fact that labeling some things as bad, or wrong makes them more appealing, by giving them the erotic charge of the forbidden.
(Many successful profit-seeking firms expect such descriptions to cause demand to increase rather than decrease. I’ve written elsewhere about flaws with the assumption that businesses are profit-seeking in the relevant sense, but I don’t think that advertising a dessert as “sinful” is intended as a voluntary equivalent to the Surgeon General’s warning on cigarettes.)
The question of preference inversion through moralization isn’t just theoretical for me, but a live practical problem. I tried to avoid offering my first child sweets for as long as I could, but when my toddler started becoming interested in sweets, mostly they served as appetizers that helped him become hungry for more substantive foods, the exact opposite of what anti-sweets propaganda had predicted. Even if he’s specifically excited about a sweet or other food I’d rather he wouldn’t choose, frequently he won’t finish it. I think this is at least partly because my reproductive partner and I have been careful to try not to force our food neuroses on him, even when this means he’s eating things we don’t think are the best.
There are exceptions, but they prove the rule. Sometimes when he’s stressed, candy becomes more appealing—but that’s less about the candy itself and more about needing quick calories to regulate emotions. Similarly, when he’s seeking comfort or trying to keep himself awake for longer at night, he might fixate on sweets. But notice how in each case, the “problematic” relationship with sugar emerges from external stressors, not from sugar itself. I do withhold sweets (and television) when I have the intuition that he’s asking for them for the wrong reasons, in a confused way, and won’t either get what he wants from them or learn efficiently from the experience.
I don’t think sweet-seeking starts out perverted; growing children need lots of calories. This turns into a maladaptive obsession with sweets when they are made into perverse fetishes by “healthy eating” propaganda. Likewise, children need a lot of loving touch, which should inform their later sexual development. Sex becomes a fetish when it’s a forbidden gateway to that missing love and touch. Cf Jessica Taylor’s All Primates Need Grooming, and Moshe Feldenkrais’s The Potent Self.
In both cases there’s enough work to be done learning contingent self-restraint without the distorting influence of a negative moral valence.
You raise an important distinction I should engage with more directly. Just as there’s a difference between teaching ‘sugar is evil and eating it makes you bad’ versus teaching healthy eating habits, there’s clearly a difference between social pressure that helps people learn from others’ accumulated wisdom (like warning children about drug addiction) versus pressure that creates persistent dysfunction (like sexual shame that continues in marriage).”
Looking at outcomes could help distinguish these:
Does the pressure help people better achieve their other goals, or create persistent internal conflicts?
Do people who successfully internalize the norm show better life outcomes in relevant domains?
Does violating the norm lead to open criticism and constructive learning, or cycles of shame and indulgence?
Is hypocrisy necessary for the system to function, or just an implementation failure?
My post focused on identifying a specific harmful pattern of preference inversion. But you’re right that not all restrictive social pressure fits this pattern. Some pressure genuinely helps people align behavior with their other goals through learning from collective wisdom.
The challenge is that preference-inverting systems often justify themselves by pointing to genuine wisdom they preserve. The question isn’t whether society has useful things to teach us (it clearly does), but how to distinguish wisdom-transmission from control mechanisms that create persistent dysfunction.
The OP addresses cases like this:
I agree that the comment you’re replying to is (narrowly) wrong (if understanding ‘prior’ as ‘temporally prior’), because someone might socially acquire a preference not to overeat sugar before they get the chance to learn they don’t want to overeat sugar. ISTM this is repaired by comparing not to ‘(temporally) prior preference’ but something like ‘reflectively stable preference absent coercive pressure’.
The part of OP you quoted only covers part of what I’m saying. It’s not just that we can be pressured into doing good things, it’s also that we have no idea what our intrinsic desires will become as we learn more about they interact with each other and the world, and there is a lot of legitimate change in intrinsic preferences which are more reflectively stable upon sufficiently good reflection, but which nevertheless revert to the shallower preferences upon typical reflection because reflection is hard and people are bad at it.
“Reflectively stable in absence of coercive pressure” is very difficult to actually measure, so it’s more of a hypothetical construct which is easy to get wrong—especially since “absence of coercive pressure” can’t actually exist, so we have to figure out which kinds of coercive pressure we’re going to include in our hypothetical.
“As calculated prior” is not quite correct, “reflectively stable absent coercive pressure” is a better formulation.
Religions that regulate sexuality comprise a heterogeneous category. I wouldn’t describe Amish regulation of sex as a case of preference inversion; the Amish try to make sure people consider leaving the community if they don’t on balance like living under its standards. But it seems like some variants of Christianity do in effect adopt a generalized anti-sex posture. Since some of these groups depend for reproductive viability on people failing to comply with the anti-sex posture, this guarantees that the anti-sex groups that survive intergenerationally are populated mainly by people who want to have sex.
I object to the framing of society being all-wise, and instead believe that for most issues it’s possible to get the benefits of both ways given some innovators on that issue. For example, visual communication was either face-to-face or heavily resource-bounded till the computer era—then there were problems of quality and price, but those have been almost fully solved in our days.
Consequently, I’d prefer “bunch of candy and no diabetes still” outcome, and there are some lines of research/ideas into how this can be done.
As for “nonmarital sex <...> will result in blowing past Goodhart’s warnings into more [personal psychological, I suppose] harm than good”, that seems already solved with the concept of “commitment”? The society might accept someone disregarding another person if that’s done with plausible deniability like “I didn’t know they would even care”, and commitment often makes you promise to care about partner’s feelings, solving* the particular problem in a more granular way than “couples should marry no matter what”. The same thing goes with other issues.
That said, I’ve recently started to think that it’s better to not push other people to less-socially-accepted preferences unless you have a really good case they can revert from exploration well and would be better off (and, thus, better not to push over social networks at all), since the limit point of person’s preferences might shift—wicked leading to more wicked and so on—to the point person wouldn’t endorse outcomes of change on reflection. I’m still considering if just noting that certain behavior is possible is a nudge significant enough to be disadvantaged (downvoted or like).
*I’d stop believing in that if commitment-based cultures had higher rate of partners failing on their promises to care than marriage-based; would be interested in some evidence either way.
Society certainly is not all-wise, and I did not frame it as such. But it is wiser than the person who thinks “Trying heroin seems like a good idea”, and then proceeds to treat heroin as if it’s the most important thing in the universe.
Is it wiser than you, in some limited way in some limited context that you are unaware of? Is it less wise, in other ways? I’d bet on “both” before either.
This isn’t the eating your cake and having it too that you think it is.
Yes, computers allow us to do things we couldn’t do before, and that’s great. Before, you might have to choose between meeting with Bob in the north or Richard in the south, and technology enables you to have both. Great!
The thing is, neither meeting Bob nor Richard is a “sin”. It’s not a “thing you will be tempted to do due to shallow preferences” where society recognizes that those preferences are shallow and predictably lead to bad outcomes. Society wasn’t all up in your business decisions telling you who to meet because it didn’t trust you to make the obviously right one; that was on you.
Candy gluttony, like heroin use, is a sin. It’s something that society knows is bad news, but will feel like good news to individuals, because individuals are myopic and lack the bigger picture. If you had lived a million lifetimes, and thrown away your life to heroin thousands of times, heroin wouldn’t be so tempting because you’d know from experience that heroin ain’t great. But you haven’t, so you don’t, and society has some wisdom to offer individuals here.
Candy consumption is the same thing, scaled down a little bit. You’re not after the calories, the micronutrients, or anything real in the candy itself. You’re after how it makes you feel. You’re after the feeling of getting what you want, without thought about whether you want the right thing. In other words, you’re wire-heading.
Pills that reduce the consequences for “sins”—whether candy consumption, or heroin consumption, or nonmarital sex—can be good. If you’re going to die from syphilis because you were too dumb to listen to society, having some forgiveness can certainly be a good thing, and maybe you’ll learn your lesson instead of just dying.
But if you think “Syphilis is treatable!” justifies all nonmarital sex, then you’re gonna need a new type of pill soon.
And if you think that once you have BC then now all nonmarital sex is justified, then you’re on track for a statistically less happy marriage.
It’s not that options aren’t often good, or even that options which reduce consequence of sin aren’t good. I’m also not arguing that antibiotics and birth control don’t open up options for good nonmarital sex, or that no one is with it enough to be able to reliably find them. Some people are; maybe you’re one of them.
But technology is not a good alternative to good decision making and informed values. Waiting around for technology that doesn’t exist yet instead of learning more about what is good now is a mistake. You get better results by learning what is good than by relying on technological crutches, and the way that this happens will often be difficult to foresee.
As an amusing anecdote relating to this, one of the more sexually successful men I know decided that he was no longer going to have sex with anyone but his future wife—whom he had not yet met. I called bullshit, and bet him $100. Not long after he made that bet, I saw his disinterest in non-future-wife sex turn a “I like you and would have sex with you” level of attraction into a “I will do whatever it takes to marry you” level of attraction. It’s hard to even conceptualize such moves from a shallow pleasure seeking mindset, and impossible to enact them. And yet, I’m quite confident that he wouldn’t have been able to marry her otherwise, and that his alternative sex life would have been much worse even from a superficial pleasure seeking perspective. It’s hard to do justice to so briefly, but that was a very strong move that led to a great marriage which wouldn’t have worked otherwise, and no amount of technological crutches would have gotten him to where he is today.
You mean like… marriage? :p
In all seriousness, I’m not taking a “in marriage only!” stance here.
The success story I give above involved sex outside marriage as an active ingredient in more than one way, and could be used to argue against a strict “in marriage only!” stance. At the same time, it demonstrates value of “in marriage only” which has been lost in what the norm has become.
He was able to thread that needle and get unusually good results because he had both respect for and an understanding of traditional “in marriage only”, and a strong enough rebellious streak to not let himself be bound by forces he didn’t agree with. You can’t get those results without respect for traditional wisdom, and neither can you get it by becoming slave to some pastor’s clumsy interpretation of them.
After thinking on this a bit, I’ve somewhat changed my mind.
(Epistemic status: filtered evidence.)
Technology and other progress has two general directions: a) more power for those who are able to wield it; b) increasing forgiveness, distance to failure. For some reason, I thought that b) was a given at least on average. However, now it came to mind that it’s possible for someone to
1) get two dates to accidentally overlap (or before confirming with partners-to-be that poly is OK),
2) lose an arbitrarily large bunch of money on gambling just online,
3) take revenge on a past offender with a firearm (or more destructive ways, as it happens),
and I’m not sure the failure margins have widened over time at all.
By the way, if technology effects aren’t really on topic, I’m open to move that discussion to shortform/dialogue.
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(Epistemic status: obtained with introspection.)
Continuing the example with sweets, I estimate my terminal goals to include both “not be ill e.g. with diabetes” and “eat tasty things”. Given tech level and my current lifestyle, there isn’t instrumental goal “eat more sweets” nor “eat less sweets”; I think I’m somewhere near the balance, and I wouldn’t want society to pass any judgement.
That sounds basically right to me, which is why I put effort into learning (and teaching) to enjoy the right things. I’m pretty proud of the fact that both my little girls like “liver treats”.
I think that’s right, but also “more distance to failure” doesn’t help so much if you use your newfangled automobile to cover that distance more quickly. It’s easier to avoid failure, but also easier to fail. A gun makes it easier to defend yourself, and also requires you to grow up until you can make those calls correctly one hundred percent of the time. With great power comes great responsibility, and all that.
I’ll take the car, and the gun, and the society that trusts people with cars and guns and other technologically enabled freedoms. But only because I think we can aspire to such responsibilities, and notice when they’re not met. All the enabling with none of the sobering fear of recklessness isn’t a combination I’m a fan of.
With respect to the “why do you believe this” question on my previous comment about promiscuity being statistically linked with marital dissatisfaction, I’m not very good at keeping citations on hand so I can’t tell you which studies I’ve seen, but here’s what chatgpt found for me when I asked for studies on the correlation.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3600089
https://unews.utah.edu/u-researcher-more-sex-partners-before-marriage-doesnt-necessarily-lead-to-divorce/
https://ifstudies.org/blog/testing-common-theories-on-the-relationship-between-premarital-sex-and-marital-stability
https://www.proquest.com/openview/46b66af73b830380aca0e6fbc3b597e3/1
I don’t actually lean that hard on the empirical regularity though, because such things are complicated and messy (e.g. the example I gave of a man with a relatively high partner count succeeding because he took an anti-promiscuous stance). The main reason I believe that pills don’t remove all the costs of promiscuity is that I can see some of the causal factors at work and have experience actually working with them to help women land happy stable relationships.
Hmm. By “coercion”, you include societal and individual judgements, not just actual direct threats. It’s still hard for me to separate (and even harder for me to privilege) “innate” preferences, over “holistic” preferences which acknowledge that there is a real advantage to existing smoothly in the current society, and include the contradictory sub-desires of thriving in a society, getting along well with allies, having fewer enemies, etc. and for the biological urges for (super)stimuli.
Consider two different contexts in which one might negotiate tradeoffs around work. When discussing work-life balance, you can openly weigh tradeoffs between career and personal time. But when asked ‘Why do you want to work at MegaCorp?’ in an interview, acknowledging you’re trading anything for a paycheck marks you as deviantly uncommitted. The system requires both pretense of pure dedication and practical compromises, while making that pattern itself unspeakable.
My post was about how this dynamic creates internalized preference inversion—where people become unable to even model certain tradeoffs to themselves, not just discuss them. And this isn’t just social pressure—you can actually be killed or imprisoned by cops or psychiatrists for ill-defined deviancy, with much conformity driven by vaguely intuited threats to construe you as the relevant sort of deviant.
Thanks for the discussion. I think I understand what you’re pointing at, but I don’t model it as an inverted preference hierarchy, or even a distinct type of preference. Human preferences are very complicated graphs of long- and short-term intents, both rational, reflective goals and … illegible desires. These desires are intertwined and correlated, and change weights (and even composition) over time—sometimes intentionally, often environmentally.
Calling it an “inversion” implies that one set is more correct or desirable than another, AND that the correct one is subverted. I disagree with both of these things philosophically and generally, though there are specific cases where I agree for myself, and for most in the current environment. My intuitions are specific and contextual for those cases, not generalizable.
When one preference is expressed only because its holders are extracting resources from people or mindparts with the opposite preference, that seems to me to justify assigning the self-sustaining one priority of some kind.
Let me try. I believe that if copies of a person (as determined by their genotype*) would be raised in different cultures and environments, their revealed preferences would mainly be clustered around a single point, with some shifts determined by what desires society showed them as acceptable/tractable and what as unfashionable. Given proper diversity of surrounding cultures list, I’d say the cluster median indicates person’s intrinsic preferences.
*it also seems intuitively right to discount traits that were [IVF?]optimized for, if any, as an outside influence; though, I have no strong opinion on this.
I’d probably call that something like “genetic values” rather than “intrinsic preferences”.
Twin studies and the like complicate the belief that genetic values are “clustered around a single point”. According to Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, religiosity is mostly genetically determined, but choice of religion is mostly socially determined. If you have a 2d map of religious views, then the genotype-derived values would be more of a river than a point.
Maybe we try to save this and say that someone with a pro-religiosity genotype has a pro-religiosity genetic value. But if they are raised in a Christian culture, they probably end up in favor of Christian religiosity and against Islamic religiosity. Given the option of taking a sci-fi pill that made them more consistently religious but changed their religion to Islam, they would decline. Is their opposition to Islamic religiosity an example of “preference inversion” then?